‘I’ll come if you want me to.’
‘OK.’
‘Do you think I’m dressed all right for it? This is the darkest outfit I’ve got with me.’
Bob ran a hand through his hair.
‘You want to come, do you?’ he said doubtfully.
‘Only if you want me to. I didn’t even know Mr Moulton.’
‘I shouldn’t come if you’d prefer not to.’
‘But, Bob, what do you want me to do?’
Bob’s phone rang, and while he was talking Dyson, who was sitting back in his chair and waiting for someone at the other end of the line, covered up the mouthpiece of his phone and said:
‘Are you coming to the funeral, Tess?’
‘I was just asking Bob if he thought I should.’
‘Why don’t you? Funerals are quite fun, you know. Well, perhaps “fun” isn’t the right word. But the sheer language of the service is marvellous! “Man that is born of a woman has but a short time to live, and is full of misery . . .” Hello? Hello – Sir William?’
Bob put his phone down.
‘The only thing is,’ he said uncertainly, ‘if everybody started turning up with their girl-friends . . .’
‘I certainly don’t want to embarrass you, Bob.’
‘It’s not that. But if everybody suddenly started turning up with their girl-friends . . .’
‘All right, Bob, I won’t come.’
‘I mean, you’re welcome to come as far as I’m concerned. But I somehow feel that it’s not a sort of social occasion . . .’
Tessa folded up her half-written letter and put it in her handbag.
‘If ever you don’t want me to come with you somewhere, Bob, you’ve only got to say. I honestly don’t mind. I wouldn’t have come to the office in the first place if you hadn’t asked me.’
‘No, I was very pleased you came . . . You’re not going now . . . ?’
‘I thought I might go shopping, or visit St Paul’s.’
‘Well, if you want to . . . But don’t feel in any way . . .’
Bob’s phone rang. Dyson, putting his own down a moment later, as Tessa looked around for her gloves, said:
‘I know what, Tessa. You look rather at a loose end over there. Would you like to become a journalist for an hour or so, and copy out one or two “In Years Gone By” columns for us from the files? It would help us out of a most tremendous hole if you would.’
Tessa was already turning the tatter-edged yellow pages over, trying to find the right date, when Bob put his phone down.
‘I thought you said you were going?’ he said.
‘John asked me to do a job for him first.’
‘I see.’
‘Is that all right, Bob?’
‘Of course it’s all right. Why should I mind? It’s nothing to do with me what you do.’
Dyson had brought his car into town specially, and everyone in the Gates at lunch wanted a lift to the funeral in it. With six large journalists aboard, all well filled with beer and sandwiches, there was scarcely room for Dyson to turn the wheel or change gear without jamming his elbow into Ted Hurwitz’s stomach.
‘Perhaps it’s just as well Tessa didn’t come, Bob,’ said Bill Waddy.
‘She could have sat in my lap,’ said Gareth Holmroyd.
‘Ay, ay!’ said Ted Hurwitz.
‘I thought she was a very nice girl, Bob,’ said Gareth Holmroyd.
‘Ay, ay, ay!’ said Ted Hurwitz.
Laurence Evenden belched behind his hand.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he said.
‘The point is,’ said Dyson, thumping the car down into second to slow up at the traffic lights, ‘a journalist ought to be specializing by the time he’s forty. That’s really why I’m rather pleased about this BBC thing. I do seem to be accepted as part of the regular television establishment. Do you know what I mean?’
‘The light’s green, John,’ said Ted Hurwitz.
Dyson let the clutch in with a belated jerk, which brought some hard and heavy object tumbling down from the dashboard to hit Bill Waddy on the knee and roll away out of sight beneath the front seats.
‘God Almighty,’ said Bill Waddy, nibbing his knee. ‘What was that?’
‘The point is,’ said Dyson, ‘I don’t feel one can go on just doing the general odds and sods indefinitely without more or less destroying himself. Do you see what I’m driving at?’
‘It looks like the other side of the road to me,’ murmured Bill Waddy.
Dyson swung the wheel to the left, then swung it sharply to the right again to avoid a lorry which was overtaking him on the inside.
‘My God,’ said Dyson, ‘the lunatics you meet on the roads these days! I’m sorry to go on about this BBC thing, but it does seem important to me.’
Laurence Evenden belched.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he said.
It was like a holiday, driving out through the suburbs on a weekday afternoon. Every now and then the sun came out, lighting up women out walking with prams and push-chairs.
‘There’s the Royal Oak,’ said Bill Waddy. ‘Do you remember the Siege of the Royal Oak in 1947, Gareth? When the old publican went off his head and shut himself up in the snug with an ex-War Department Very pistol, and shot distress signals through the serving hatch at anyone who came near?’
‘That’s right,’ said Gareth Holmroyd. ‘You were on the Mail then, weren’t you, Bill? There was you and I there, and old Freddie Samuelson of the Express, and Walter Edgworth of the Mirror . . .’
‘Old Walter’s dead now, you know.’
‘No! Is he? Poor old Walter!’
‘He went out to a paper in East Africa. Got some disease out there.’
‘What will you do now that poor old Eddy’s gone, John?’ asked Laurence Evenden. ‘Will you get someone else, do you think?’
‘I’ll have to have someone, Laurence. I was absolutely run into the ground as it was. And now it looks as though I’m going to be tied up with television work pretty regularly.’
‘You know Harry Stearns wants you to take over Lighting-Up Times and Phases of the Moon, John?’ said Gareth Holmroyd.
‘I know. I can’t possibly do it. Not without more staff. I’ve told the Editor.’
‘Charles Baker’s trying to get rid of Shipping Movements,’ said Ted Hurwitz. ‘I bet he manages to land them on poor old John in the end.’
‘He won’t,’ said Dyson. ‘He can’t. I can’t do it.’
‘He tried to unload it on me,’ said Gareth Holmroyd. ‘I told him I thought John Dyson was the man.’
‘Well, I’m not,’ said Dyson.
‘Old John’ll manage somehow,’ said Bill Waddy. ‘Why don’t you change down, John? We’ve almost stopped.’
Bob, who had sat in silence from the beginning of the journey, crushed between Gareth Holmroyd and Laurence Evenden in the back, sighed meditatively.
‘It’s funny to think we’re on our way to poor old Eddy’s funeral,’ he said.
‘Look, Dancy Street,’ said Bill Waddy. ‘Wasn’t that where some bakery foreman dressed himself up in a turban, said he was an Eastern potentate, and persuaded half a dozen women to move in with him as his harem? 1949, I think it was.’
‘Nineteen fifty-one,’ said Gareth Holmroyd. ‘The old king died next day and killed the story stone dead. There’s Holt’s Depository – remember that? Where the kids shot the sky-rocket through the fan-light and set fire to all the furniture? You know who was on that story? Old Jimmy Mulholland of The Guardian. He’s a PRO with the Coal Board now.’
‘He’s not, you know,’ said Ted Hurwitz. ‘He’s dead.’
‘No!’
‘Died of lung cancer, last summer. I saw his brother in the Cock a couple of months ago.’
‘Well, who’d have thought it! A great big, strapping man, he was. Poor old Jimmy!’
‘I can’t help feeling, to revert for a moment,’ said Dyson, ‘that television is rather more my métier. I do think
that one can put one’s ideas over rather more forcefully and precisely when one’s present in the flesh, with all one’s conversational resources to hand.’
‘Poor old Jimmy!’ said Gareth Holmroyd.
‘It’s a funny thing,’ said Bob, emerging from his silence again. ‘I was just thinking about poor old Eddy. He’d have enjoyed being on this trip with us today, you know.’
‘He wouldn’t have enjoyed going to his own funeral, Bob,’ said Laurence Evenden. ‘He wasn’t morbid.’
‘I didn’t mean that . . .’
‘Do you remember Basil Merriman’s funeral, Gareth?’ said Bill Waddy. ‘It was snowing a blizzard, and we got lost in the middle of nowhere out beyond Aylesbury?’
Dyson swerved to avoid a hole in the road, hit it dead in the middle, and brought Bill Waddy’s window down with a crash.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Dyson. ‘That’s always happening. Just jam it with that wedge of paper.’
Laurence Evenden belched.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he said.
Tessa sat at Bob’s desk in the empty department all afternoon, newspaper files stacked in front of her, trying intermittently to finish the job that Dyson had given her. She didn’t find it easy; she wasn’t a great reader. Between whiles she got up and looked out of the window, watching the pale sunshine come and go on the elaborate mouldings and cornices of the offices on the opposite side of Hand and Ball Court, until she realized she was being watched from a window of the floor above by two young men in shirt-sleeves. They smiled and waved at her, and she hurried back to the desk, blushing.
It was quiet and calm in the empty room. From time to time one of the phones rang, and she stared at it and held her breath till it stopped. Now and then messengers would come in, look in the empty out-baskets, and go out again without a word; or put proofs on the desk beside her – rolled galleys, and damp, folded pages. ‘Thank you,’ she said, not daring to look them in the face. But most of the time the only reminders of the outside world were remote sounds which merely emphasized the quiet of the room itself – the murmur of traffic away in Fleet Street, a typewriter clicking somewhere, some girls giggling, milk bottles falling over, a boy whistling.
She looked through the drawers of Bob’s desk, curious to explore even the most unconsidered corners of his life. She found a paper bag with two toffees in it; a book on Burma with a page of Bob’s notes inside; yellowing, dusty copy paper, crumpled carbons, expired typewriter ribbons; a brier pipe, grey with age, left over perhaps from some previous occupant; a dusty brown shoe with a hole in it; three rusty razor-blades; an ancient copy of Queen magazine; a letter from herself . . .
She opened the letter and began to read it. ‘My dearest, darlingest Bob,’ it began. ‘Masses of hugs and kisses from your silly adoring Tessa, because the sun’s shining, and I know there’ll be a letter from you tomorrow, and because anyway all I want to do is to send you masses of hugs and kisses . . .’
She put her hand over her eyes, too embarrassed to read on. How could she have written such stuff? How could she? It was like coming across an embarrassing old photograph of herself. The letter was dated four weeks before.
It could have been four years. She felt that she had changed entirely since it was written; and chiefly during the three days since she had been in London.
How would she write to Bob now? She leaned on the files, making her sleeves grey with dust, looking up at the pale blue patches appearing and disappearing above the rooftops outside the window. ‘Darling Bob,’ she would start – nothing more elaborate, nothing more gushing. No, not even that. Just, ‘Bob’. ‘Bob, understand now that nothing in life is as easy as it at first seems, and that being in love is a condition which can cause one a great deal of pain. Of course, I knew that before. But I supposed that it was only the sweet pain of yearning, the sweet uncertainty of what-may-perhaps-be. But now I see that the sweetness goes, and that the pain which remains is just the ordinary, unilluminating misery of humiliation, embarrassment, and inadequacy. You have hurt me a lot in the past three days, Bob, and I think you will hurt me a great deal more in the days to come. You don’t love me very much. Perhaps you don’t love me at all. But why should you? I can see how hopelessly unsuitable I am for you; all I ever do is misunderstand what you say, and I weep. But you’ll never have the strength to send me away – you’re so weak, Bob, that it embarrasses me – and in the end the job will fall to me; I shall have to send myself away. What a miserable responsibility to be loaded with! I put it off from day to day out of pity for myself. For in spite of everything, you are present in all my waking thoughts. Whichever way I turn – you. I revolve about you, dazed and unhappy, with my eyes fixed on you hopelessly. Look how I write you this letter! I keep it inside my head, so that you’ll never see it, or anything like it . . .’
Tears brimmed out of her eyes, and ran down her cheeks. She walked about the room, hating herself for pitying herself. She looked out of the window, carefully read the titles of all the books on the shelf, from Take Your Car to North Africa! to National Debt or National Death? – The Bankers’ Plot Exposed, and stopped crying. She sat down and set to work on the files. The phone continued to ring from time to time; messengers continued to call. Once or twice people put their heads round the door and asked her if the Meditation proof was up yet, or whether she knew that she had four inches less than usual on page twelve. ‘I’m sorry,’ she told these heads, keeping her red eyes turned away from them, ‘Mr Dyson and Mr Bell are at the funeral. I don’t work here myself.’ ‘I see,’ they said, not seeing, and withdrew uncertainly.
One of the callers came right into the room. He was a tall, wasted man with bushy grey hair, bushy grey eyebrows, and more bushy grey hair growing out of his nose and ears. He crept right across to her desk on tiptoe, as if to avoid obtruding too much on her consciousness, and smiled down at her with a wasted, ingratiating smile.
‘Hello,’ he whispered. ‘You’re the new girl, are you?’
‘No,’ said Tessa, blushing.
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I hadn’t seen you around before, so I thought . . .’
‘I don’t work here.’
‘I see. I see. I just thought, seeing you working here . . .’
He waved his hands uneasily, still smiling.
‘Well, I’m working here now,’ said Tessa, brushing nervously back at the hair hanging around her scarlet cheeks, ‘but I don’t actually work here.’
‘I see. Anyway, I’m Mr Dancer, the Chief Sub-Editor. So now we know. Well, I’ll say goodbye. I’m sorry to have . . .’
‘No, no. I’m sorry I was . . .’
‘It was nice to . . .’
‘Yes . . .’
Still smiling his deathly smile, and nodding his head awkwardly, he tiptoed backwards to the door and disappeared.
Dyson fixed his gaze upon the east window of the crematorium chapel, screwing up his eyes, trying to fill his head with the radiating rods of light and a steady contemplation of death. Light; flowers; brass fittings; solemn intonation; and in that box the already decomposing remains of the man who had occupied the corner desk in Dyson’s office each day since he had taken the department over. Then poor old Eddy had been a jungle of faint electric circuits connected to make thoughts and memories and aches and sleepiness, like a blackboard of chalk dust patterned to form the binomial theorem or the history of the Fourth Crusade. Now those slight differences of electrical potential had disappeared, like the chalk dust at the end of the lesson. Old Eddy had been wiped clean. Dyson tried to fix his mind upon the tiny grains of chalk fleeing before the duster, filling the air, and settling upon shiny surfaces, totally and eternally discharged of theorem and crusade, or any lingering imprint of them.
There were a dozen mourners from the family in the front pews – women with grey curls and mild glasses, an old man bent over a stick, his head projecting forwards from the unoccupied collar of his overcoat like a tortoise’s; a school-boy in a neat navy-blue trenchcoat, holding
a maroon cap. Women in tweed overcoats, men in dark melton overcoats – they seemed more overcoats than people; the sort of people whose personalities are not large enough to dominate their outdoor clothes. Two of the ladies’ overcoats were sniffling, and with infinite discretion blowing their noses. I have a lump in my throat, thought Dyson. I definitely have a lump in my throat. I am pervaded by a deep and solemn sadness. Yes, yes, I am awed by a cognition of mortality. A cognition? Why not ‘a sense’? God, one’s thoughts need subbing at times! All the same, a cognition is what it feels like, set among these flowers, these stabbing rods of light, these solemn sacerdotal periods, this indisputable lump in the throat. The lesson was from Corinthians. ‘If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not?’ Such words! Such sonorous words, breaking like a dark, silver-shot ocean upon this unpromising overcoated shore!
‘For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.’ Yes, thought Dyson, at that I can feel a prickling behind the lids of my eyes! At that I am almost ready to break down and weep! And yet . . . do I in any sense believe that poor old Eddy shall put on immortality? Isn’t it rather terrible that what brings the prickling behind my eyelids is not old Eddy’s death, or even the thought of human mortality in general, but certain strokes of rhetoric – certain alliterations, repetitions, and verbal sonorities which don’t hold any literal meaning for me? I’m more moved by literature than by what it describes!
The lump in the throat – where has it gone? Oh God, have I forgotten how poor old Eddy sat at his desk in Hand and Ball Court on the last day of his life, talking about those past times which were most important to him, and how nobody took any notice? Have I forgotten how nobody really cared, how nobody really knew him? Doesn’t that bring the lump back to the throat, if one really dwells on it? Well, doesn’t it? And isn’t it a little moving to think of all these various people being moved by poor old Eddy’s death? Moved enough, anyway, to abandon their day’s work and come here to be told that the trumpet would sound, and poor old Eddy be raised incorruptible? There was anguish in thinking of the anguish felt within the overcoats; and in the hearts of people from the office with some substance and standing, like Gareth Holmroyd and Laurence Evenden; and in the heart of one whose face would be well-known to anyone in the front pews from their television screens, if they happened to turn round . . .
Towards the End of the Morning Page 16